Miroslav,
The NTP daemon purposely ignores the leftover from adjtime(). To do
otherwise would invite massive instability. Each time an NTP update is
received, a new offset estimate is available regardless of past history.
Therefore, the intent is to ignore all past history and start with a
fresh update. Note that the slew rate of adjtime() is not a factor with
the kernel discipline.
Dave
Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 04:06:39PM +0000, Dave Hart wrote:
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 09:24 UTC, Miroslav Lichvar <mlich...@redhat.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 10:03:30PM +0000, David L. Mills wrote:
I ran the same test here on four different machines with the
expected results. These included Solaris on both SPARC and Intel
machines, as well as two FreeBSD machines.
[...]
Ok, I think I have found the problem. The adj_systime() routine is
called from adj_host_clock() with adjustments over 500 microseconds,
which means ntpd is trying to adjust the clock at a rate higher than
what uses the Linux adjtime(). It can't keep up and the lost offset
correction is what makes the ~170ppm frequency error.
Congratulations on isolating the problem. If adjtime() is returning
failure, ntpd will log that mentioning adj_systime. Do you see any of
those?
No, it's not an error in usage, adjtime() just don't have enough time
to apply whole correction and ntpd doesn't check the leftover, so
the offset is adjusted actually slower than what ntpd is assuming.
Is it a feature or a bug that FreeBSD and Solaris can apparently slew
faster than 500 PPM using adjtime()?
If it's a feature, is there a way we can detect at configure time what
the adjtime() slew limit is without actually trying it? We don't want
to require root for configure.
Probably not. I think I saw on one BSD system only 100ppm rate, so it
will have to be clamped to either the lowest rate from all supported
systems or to a constant defined in the configure script based on
the system and version.
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